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Genetics, parents’ lifestyle determine child’s metabolism

The metabolic traits of children are likely caused by familial lifestyle and common genetics instead of effects on the fetus, according to findings recently published in PLoS Medicine.

“In Western populations, the proportion of women who start pregnancy overweight or obese has increased over the last 20 to 30 years and is now estimated to be between 20% to 50%,” Diana L. Santos Ferreira, MSc, PhD, a postdoctoral senior research associate in metabolomic epidemiology and biostatistics at the School of Social and Community Medicine at the University of Bristol, United Kingdom, and colleagues wrote. “However, whether the associations of maternal adiposity and associated traits with offspring outcomes are causal is unknown, and if they are causal, then the mechanisms are unclear.”

To gather more data, researchers collected paternal, maternal prepregnancy, and child BMI from 5,337 mother-father-offspring trios in Europe. Data on 153 metabolic traits in the children were obtained from blood samples taken when they were 16, 17 or 31 years of age.

Santos Ferreira and colleagues found that higher paternal and maternal BMI was linked to a negative cardiometabolic profile in the child. They also discovered strong negative associations with HDL-diameter, HDL-cholesterol, HDL_2-cholesterol, and HDL₃-cholesterol, but strong positive associations to branched/aromatic amino acids, glycoprotein acetyls, and triglycerides as well as very-low-density lipoprotein (VLDL)-lipoproteins, VLDL-cholesterol, VLDL-triglycerides and VLDL-diameter.

In addition, the authors found marginally stronger magnitudes of associations in maternal vs. paternal BMI, but there was no strong statistical evidence for heterogeneity between them after multiple testing.

Santos Ferriera and colleagues also wrote that they performed a two-stage, individual participant data meta-analysis. Stage 1 had regression outputs of standardized offspring metabolic traits with standardized parental BMI were obtained separately for each cohort and for maternal and paternal BMI was conducted. Stage 2 then gathered the results from each cohort, then meta-analyzed the information together using a random effects inverse-variance-weighted method.

Researchers wrote that results mirrored each other in each of the three cohorts, and in the two-stage analysis. Researchers also found that a child’s BMI showed comparable arrangements of cross-sectional association with metabolic profile with regards to parental pre-pregnancy BMI associations but with more significant magnitudes. In addition, adjustment of parental BMI±child metabolic traits relationships to the offspring BMI implied these parental relationships were largely due to the relationships of parental BMI with the child’s BMI.

“Our findings are more supportive of shared familial factors than intrauterine developmental overnutrition mechanisms for associations of maternal BMI with offspring metabolic traits,” Santos Ferriera and colleagues wrote. “Interventions to reduce BMI in all family members may be more beneficial for cardiometabolic health than focusing on reducing maternal pre-conception or pregnancy BMI.” – by Janel Miller

Disclosure: Santos Ferreira reports no relevant financial disclosures. Please see the study for all other authors’ relevant financial disclosures.